Date when last hosted by this company (as of December 8, 2002): 3 months - 1 year ago

Plan used: $7.95

Customer service rating: 1 out of 10

Technical quality rating: 3 out of 10

Cost rating: 5 out of 10

Overall rating: 1 out of 10

I have had several sites hosted by Hostsave for about two years, when they used to be at $6.95 and 40Mb webspace from memory. Back then this was pretty good value for money, and one of the best deals around - especially having your own cgi-bin which not many companies let you have.

Over the months, webspace and bandwitdth got upgraded to 60mb and eventually to 100mb, however the price went up to $7.95/month.

Around this time the "new" control panel went up, and it was at this stage many, many problems started, amongst others - user htaccess/htpasswd lists were wiped, mails were lost, ftp access impossible, cgi scripts came up with weird errors and the rest of it. To top it all off, they had the infamous stats "not updating" problem which resulted in one of my sites losing stats for the last two years. And no, there was no backup.

Service was terrible, but back then the price was good and you simply had to put up with it. However, it certainly was annoying that there was no telephone line, because once my credit card was declined for a change of address reason and my website was *instantly* suspended, and it took *SEVEN* days for Hostsave to respond to my pleading e-mails to recharge my card or do anything. Seven days! Since I had a reasonably popular site this caused it to drop from Google, and I nearly lost the Yahoo listing - thank God Yahoo didn't re-spider at the time.

This was scary, and for sure, it was a cheap hosting provider, but their method of instant suspension coupled with no other form of getting in touch with them for days means that at the slightest problem you WILL go offline.

The biggest reason to switch was after reading this website, and figuring out that in 2002 $7.95 for 100MB wasn't so hot anymore. The biggest factor by now was speed, though, and I was about to sign up for IcdSoft when I read that it suffered from slow speeds.

So I decided to go out on a limb and try Dot5 which was also receiving great reviews on this website.

What a FANTASTIC difference! The biggest difference compared with HostSave was plain speed. Super fast CGI execution, I simply fell off my chair when I saw it. HostSave's CGI execution was terrible. Note this is not the same as simple HTML downloading, because Hostsave would sit and think for hours about my Perl scripts which Dot5 was now doing in milliseconds.

The other fantastic things about Dot5 have got to be value for money - $6.99 or whatever it is gets you something like 250mb webspace and tons of bandwidth - lots more than Hostsave's for the same money.

But bandwidth and MB aren't what's important. What's important is support, and speed.

Dot5's support is also simply legendary. In most cases, I can e-mail and receive a response within an hour. Once I had a response in FIVE minutes. It's amazing - never seen anything like it.

I have asked questions and have received detailed, *personal* responses - try mailing "support@dot5hosting.com" with some arbitrary question and judge for yourselves the *time* and if you're talking to a *human*.

The other thing that clinched the deal was that Dot5 offered monthly invoicing, which IcdSoft did not.

The only minor gripes about Dot5 are:

a) you get invoiced every month, there is no "credit card on file". So go on vacation and you could get suspended. However, Dot5's suspension policy is something like over 10 days after you receive your invoice. But you can always pay yearly if you want.

b) You can't easily password protect /stats, but after a letter to support it was well and clearly explained how to do it with SSH.

Whilst this isn't supposed to be an ad for Dot5, I hope it encourages some people still stuck on HostSave to try something different. Let HostSave die. You need to stay competitive these days. I am sorry.

The final nail in the coffin for HosSave, however, I leave to the end:

I had four domains with them, three of them not so important, but one really very important one which I wanted to get set up on Dot5 before I cancelled anything so I could simply change the Name Servers.

Anyway, I asked them to cancel one of my three unimportant domains which I already had set up on Dot5.

So what did they do?

They cancelled the important domain!!! Gone!!!!!!! Those idiots!!! I specifically said which one to cancel, and they go and cancel the wrong one. Human error or just plain Hostsave crap!?!?

I immediately signed up for it at Dot5, and had it running again within a day, and Name Servers clicked over within the next 48 hours.

The irony was by the time HostSave responded to my e-mail it was several days later after I was already happily running on Dot5.

So no more HostSave. You guys were great 2 years ago, but 2003 will hopefully see your demise. Amen.